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Understanding the dynamics of opinions, preferences and of culture as whole requires more use of empirical data than has been done so far. It is clear that an important role in driving this dynamics is played by social influence, which is…
A quantitative understanding of societies requires useful combinations of empirical data and mathematical models. Models of cultural dynamics aim at explaining the emergence of culturally homogeneous groups through social influence.…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes. Human history can be regarded as a sequence of long periods of cultural stasis punctuated by paradigm shifts that transform culture upside-down over the turn of a few…
The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infers its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinct different view, where plausible mechanisms are proposed…
Cultural trends and popularity cycles can be observed all around us, yet our theories of social influence and identity expression do not explain what perpetuates these complex, often unpredictable social dynamics. We propose a theory of…
It is shown that, in certain circumstances, systems of cultural rules may be represented by doubly stochastic matrices denoted called possibility transforms, and by certain real valued possibility densities with inner product. Using such…
Culture is not just traits but a dynamic system of interdependent beliefs, practices and artefacts embedded in cognitive, social and material structures. Culture evolves as these entities interact, generating path dependence, attractor…
There are both benefits and drawbacks to cultural diversity. It can lead to friction and exacerbate differences. However, as with biological diversity, cultural diversity is valuable in times of upheaval; if a previously effective solution…
Recent studies have highlighted interesting structural properties of empirical cultural states: collections of cultural traits sequences of real individuals. Matrices of similarity between individuals may be constructed from these states,…
Many cultural traits characterizing intelligent behaviors are now thought to be transmitted through statistical learning, motivating us to study its effects on cultural evolution. We conduct a large-scale music data analysis and observe…
Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance in understanding behavior. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory so far has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present…
How does social complexity depend on population size and cultural transmission? Kinship structures in traditional societies provide a fundamental illustration, where cultural rules between clans determine people's marriage possibilities.…
Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…
Stochastic processes offer a flexible mathematical formalism to model and reason about systems. Most analysis tools, however, start from the premises that models are fully specified, so that any parameters controlling the system's dynamics…
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Music is a universal feature of human culture, linked to embodied cognitive functions that drive learning, action, and the emergence of creativity and individuality. Evidence highlights the critical role of statistical learning an implicit…
We contribute to the understanding of social relationships within cultural contexts by proposing a connection between a social theory, relational models theory (RMT: Fiske 1991, 1992) and a social and political one, cultural or plural…
How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal…